The Vine - an excerpt

The Vine grew out of a story told to Boori Monty Pryor. He was spending a week in residence at a secondary school. A teacher came up to him on the third day and gave him a poem. It told of a childhood love for an Aboriginal boy.

Where the teacher grew up, a relationship between her and the boy was out of the question, so she nurtured this love in her heart for 36 years without telling anyone. I was familiar with the kind of attitudes the teacher was surrounded by as a child from my experiences growing up in western Queensland.

Her story stayed with me until I could write something to honour it. When Caro Llewellyn, editor at Random House, invited contributions for her anthology, My One True Love, The Vine took shape growing out of the teacher's story.

Holidays are hard. I'm going to make this one easy. Just Pete and me. No kids, no organising, no decisions. I booked a tour, accepted my dear mother-in-law's offer, and left the three kids at home. Sophie's the youngest. Thirteen. A handful. We need a break from each other.

A package tour. Ten-day Red Centre Experience, Uluru, Kata Tjuta, Kings Canyon, MacDonnell Ranges, luxury resort accommodation some of the time, twelve-star camping the rest. Reward yourself, the brochure says, with an outback escape. I never thought I'd do it. I hate that word 'outback'. ' That's where I grew up and to me it wasn't out the back of anywhere. It was my home, the centre of the world.

But we're here. We made it. We've arrived. Dinner's done. Pete's gone to bed. The meeting-new-people smile washes off my face along with the make-up and I settle into the quiet. My holiday's begun.

I can't sleep. I open the doors on the desert night. The smell of cool evening air sinking into the hot earth makes me want to dance or weep or walk naked into the night and never come back. Instead, I drag a chair outside and sit, trying to make out that shape in the dark, the one big one, the one living breathing mountain of a shape --- Uluru.

I notice my breathing change, become slow and easy. I've got space for me. I don't know what I want to do first. I'm getting tingly in all kinds of places. I can't imagine lying straight in bed. I still feel a bit wobbly. I don't know if you've had that feeling when you can't tell if the car's stopped, the movement keeps going. Or when you jolt awake in the night, something cramping in on you. You can't go back to sleep because you can't trust that you'll wake up. I've had the tests. All clear. But I know there's something growing in there.

I need a holiday is all anyone can tell me. They're right. Even at the airport check-in, I felt the responsibilities lift off my shoulders like baggage, rolling away down the conveyor belt and into the belly of this big bird, this cocoon about to carry me away for a rest from my life. I even got the giggles, girl giggles, silly giggles over nothing more than the airline stewards' safety demonstration.

Looking down on the dot-painted landscape moving in giant serpent trails and caterpillar ridges, I thought of the country I grew up in. Flat, dry country. Red earth between dumps of mulga trees. Next thing I'm crying,trying to figure out why I feel like I'm an outcast.

The Vine was first published in
My One True Love
A collection of stories and essays on life, passion and obsession.
Edited by Caro Llewellyn
Random House, Australia
ISBN 0 091 83704 9